This is the first draft of this. Publishing to seek feedback from people, writers most of all. Lemme know what you think.
TLDR: Soon there will be three ways to get a biography written on sgwashere.com. About ₹5 lakh, written by biographers I train, with AI tools doing the grunt work. ₹10 lakh for the gift book, written by me. ₹20 lakh for the full book, written by me. Same method in all three. What changes is who writes it.
Read on for details.
Hello! Lemme talk about three things that got me here.
A. Chai.
You can buy chai for 50 rupees at a cafe next door. You can buy chai for 500 at a fancy hotel. And there is no end to what you can pay for chai. Same leaves. Same milk. Every price exists, and nobody goes without chai. What changes is where you sit and who pours.
B. The people who write to me.
So, I run sgwashere.com. People write to me when they want a biography written. Most of the time, of a parent. A father turning 80. A mother whose stories nobody has put on paper.
Thing is, I would love to work with each person who writes in, but I am unable to take those gigs up. Most people read the numbers I quote and turn back.
I dont blame them. It is a lot of money.
But it bothers me.
A biography of your parent is one of the most important gifts you can give them. And for a parent, we must do whatever we can.
I dont want to be the reason a family starts this and cannot finish it. And I really really dont want to be the guy who feeds off that insecurity.
C. The writers.
There are a lot of people who want to write biographies. Good writers. Some of them have never had the first commission. And today there are AI tools that do in an hour what used to take a week. Transcribing fifteen hours of tape. Sorting it into stories. Building a timeline.
So, combining A, B and C, presenting the ₹5 lakh book, written by my team.
What is it?
A biography of your parent, at about ₹5 lakh, for families who want to gift it and can only invest a certain amount.
Who writes it?
My team. Writers I find and train. People who want to write biographies and are willing to start here. I give them the method I use on every book: how to approach a father who says his life is not interesting, the 100 questions, the chapter plan, the free guide on the site. And I give them the network. The designers and printers I already work with, so the book ends up as a book, and not as a PDF in somebody’s inbox.
Where does AI come in?
In the grunt work. Transcription. Sorting. First timelines. The writer still asks the second question. The writer still sits with the pages till they sound like your mother.
Then what do you pay ₹20 lakh for?
Me. Same method in all three. Same questions, same chapter plan, same designers and printers. At ₹5 lakh a biographer on my team writes it, and I train them. At ₹10 lakh I write the gift book myself, twelve stories and ten hardbacks. At ₹20 lakh I write the full book, every page of it. That is the premium. My time and my pen. Every family will know who is writing before they pay anything.
Wont writers hate this?
Some will. I can already hear it. How can you offer a book at such a small number? Fair. I have made that argument on my own site. Hamare paas writing ka gift hai. But that gift needs to find a home too. If every book has to be written by me, most of the gift goes nowhere.
What I dont know yet.
Lots. How I pick the writers. How I check their work without becoming the bottleneck. Whether ₹5 lakh pays a writer enough for four months of work. I will figure these out as I go, and write about it here.
If you are a writer and you want to write biographies, lemme know. Write to me with one paragraph about a person whose life you would want to write.
Chai for 50 rupees is still chai. A book for ₹5 lakh is still your mother’s book.
Thanks for reading!
SG